Last week Washington Post ran a story attempting to portray presumptive Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney as a homophobic bully. Despite every effort to contain it, the story imploded, as factual inaccuracies came to light. Furthermore, the victim’s own sisters (he died of liver cancer in 2004) claimed to have no knowledge of incident, with one of them telling ABC News, “If he were still alive today, he would be furious.” Yet as is often the case with highly publicized news stories, other mainstream media outlets attempted to keep the thematic aspect of the piece alive, irrespective of the facts. Thus, when former Newt Gingrich campaign manager Rick Tyler showed up for an MSNBC interview with Martin Bashir, Bashir attempted to do exactly that. Tyler was having none of it. “I would consider things like Barack Obama bullying the Supreme Court, bullying the EPA, bullying hundreds of property owners and business owners, bullying donors to the Romney campaign. That’s what bullying is when they have an effect on private citizens not people running against them but people who disagree with them politically,” said Tyler. “That’s bullying!”

Tyler’s assessment of the current president is spot on. Moreover, one need not go back almost five decades to underscore that reality. As recently as April 26th, the Wall Street Journal’s Kimberly Strassel revealed that one of the Obama re-election campaign websites, “The Truth Team,” published “Behind the curtain: A brief history of Romney’s donors.” It was an ugly attempt to slur and intimidate donors to Mitt Romney’s election campaign. Eight private citizens were described as having “less-than-reputable records,” being “on the wrong side of the law” and making themselves successful at “the expense of so many Americans.”

As we know, some bullies are actually masking a deep insecurity. This is portrayed very amusingly in the children’s cartoon Phineas and Ferb (best children’s show EVER, by the way), where the bully character Buford is shown having a metaphysical and sensitive side, and using his bullying to mask deeper insecurities.

Of course, that does not describe all bullies, and it does not excuse bullying, but insecurity is in evidence in many bullies. Barack Obama is clearly a bully, and he does show signs of insecurity. One recent example comes by way of Ace of Spades and Redstate.

It’s an AP picture, so I won’t actually post it here, but you can click through to the links above to see it. It shows Barack Obama at someone’s home, supposedly attempting to connect with ordinary folks—and yet he’s behind a semicircular wall with a little presidential podium. It makes him look like he’s trying to look big, but it makes him look very small. It’s just this kind of excessive presidential pomp that feeds into his Dear Leader image. It makes him look rather insecure, in fact. Given that he is the president and can say, “No, I’d rather just stand here with a microphone and these nice people,” one has to presume that he wants it this way.

Which might also explain how he can bring himself to stand behind his a podium and use teleprompters when speaking to a classroom of elementary school kids.

At least Bush just sat down and read to the kids, like any normal person would.

All of this contributes to an image of a man who is too small for the role, and needs to embiggen himself however he can.